Making wristbands at the festival

Music festival time is upon us again and, if they are proliferating then who is to blame, in these times of agricultural diversification, any farmer using his fields for that cash crop that is middle class people listening to music with their faces painted.

There’s the Big Festival, there’s the Folk Festival (formally the Crusty Festival), there’s the Hipster Festival (formally the other Folk Festival), there’s the Other Folk Festival (formally a Great little Folk Festival That The Family Really Enjoyed), there’s the Family Festival (formally Just Another festival until somebody added a comedy tent, a poetry tent and a puppet theatre), there’s the Rock Festival and, of course, there’s the Corporate Festival In The Park, probably sponsored by a credit card company or arms dealer.

There’s lots of festivals.  Want yours to stand out?  Here’s how you do it.

Every ticket holder gets their own toilet.  Which is cleaned every three hours.

Impractical?  Have you seen the price of tickets for festivals recently?  Never mind Madonna playing your festival, for the sort of money you could pay her, the woman would be on with the marigolds and forming a supergroup with Kim and Aggie.

If you had sensational toilet facilities at your festival, then I don’t care if thanks to Time Lord technology you had the original line up of the Beatles headlining, all everyone would talk about when they got home was that after a three day diet of lentil burgers, tofu shakes and whatever the fuck kale is, which is the only sort of thing permitted by law to be sold at a music festival instead of food, nobody had a bad word to day about the cludgies.

Want to enjoy music festivals?  Well, it used to be that wags would suggest you watch on telly, put the telly down the end of your garden to simulate a stage not just in a different post code but in a different time zone, charge yourself ten quid for a warm lager and fifty quid for a bag of something that comes in a baggie that still bears the ‘Barts’ logo on the side.  Then spend three hours trying to find the tent you have pitched in your garden.  That’s all very well except that if you actually attend the festival you don’t have to contend with teevee presenters doing live links.

Jesus.  What is it about deejays and live telly.  Presumably, these people should be quite good at live broadcasting, as most radio shows are live, allowing the deejay to react to news, read out tweets and make emotional farewells, promising their listeners they will be back after their trial where they are confident they will be acquitted.  Maybe it’s the camera, deejays look into the camera like members of the public from 1950s Pathe films who had never seen a camera before, they are hypnotised, or off their faces.

The best way to enjoy a festival is to cover it as a journalist, as this means that no bad the acts or how disappointing it is that a singer you really liked has turned into one of those massive dicks that think it’s acceptable to hold their microphone out to the audience when performing a song (and oh, how we yearn for 10,000 people to chant Wanker! Wanker! The second they do so), you’re still getting paid, and you get to leave mid-afternoon on day one, which is about the time when the toilets turn.

If you can’t photoshop a press pass using the ‘Tattler’ logo and a home laminating kit (trade secret…invest in a convincing lanyard, one that says ‘Chelsea FC’ is unlikely to fool even the dimmest security guard, who is probably a fanb and has one of his own at home) then the best way to enjoy is to up your accommodation budget.  This is available in several packages:

Bronze – a day pack, 200 wet wipes and a carton of pro-plus.  Who needs to sleep, or regular bowel movements for a week afterwards.  Just white-knuckle three days of festival fun.

Silver – a yurt.  If you’re an absolute cunt, this is the festival accommodation for you.  Make sure to bring your own dreamcatcher.  Today’s yurt dweller knows that when it comes to wifi and being able to bang on endlessly about a spiritual experience, nothing beats a yurt.  If, however, you arrive to take possession of your yurt not in a hybrid people-carrier but at the head of a rabble of restless Mongols and a herd of yak ready for slaughter and barbecue, then that is a different proposition entirely.

Gold – (always believe in your soul!) helicopter.  In, bop, out.

Platinum – ahhhh, here we go.  Motor home.  Do you know what the difference between living as God intended and living like an animal is?  Six inches.  That’s the distance separating the ground from the bottom of your camper van.  Drive up, park up, plug in, barter some steaks from that nice Mr Khan in the yurt paddock, then turn on your telly and watch the festival with a finger covering over the ‘mute’ button in preparation for the arrival on screen of the lackwits who present the thing.  As for red button coverage, if I press a red button I expect to see a surface to twat missile streaking away from the launcher on top of my camper van and vaporising whatever cultural excrescence has offended me, most likely somebody who wears sunglasses indoors and says ‘like’ too often.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about wristbands.

Different tribes have different markers for honour, success, experience.  In the military, your medals show the world that you have a nodding relationship with heroism.  In the racing world, the form is to suspend your enclosure passes from your field glasses, resulting over time in a rather pleasing multicoloured effect not unlike a paper lei.  If you are a regular festival goer, then your scars are your wristbands.

A wristband is an easy way to ensure that only the people who are supposed to be in a place are in that place.  By the way, if you are anywhere where you have to wear a wristband, you might want to think about what you can do to become the sort of person who doesn’t need a wristband to be at that event.  My advice?  Photoshop.  Home laminator.  A very small loom that can produce a lanyard that reads ‘Reuters’).  They are popular with festival organisers because once they are on, thanks to the wonders of modern synthetic materials, the person wearing them is going to rot faster than the wristband, essential given the need to establish if somebody had paid the £800 entry fee or tunnelled under the fence, and essential given the festival microclimate.

In most circumstances, those allocated a wristband can’t wait to cut that fucker off the moment they leave hospital, which is about the only other place where knowing somebody’s identity is really really important and they are not always drug-free enough to tell you.  Not so the festival wristband.  For some reason, festival goers like to continue to wear their wrist bands, and these are wrist bands that didn’t even give them fast-track access to the executive cludgie, long after the festival has finished.

Harmless, probably.  Decorative, possibly.  Twatty, definitely.

Postcard from Norfolk - Caravans

Caravans, it would appear, have come a long way since the holidays of my childhood, when, if I recollect correctly, they were essentially overheated (perfect British holiday weather exists in fading Polaroid’s and childhood memories) Tupperware boxes filled with happy holidaymakers and a miasma of feet and drying beach-towels.

We are holidaying in Norfolk, and we are in a caravan.  This is not a social experiment.  This is real.  It’s also an attempt to ‘try something different”.  Why we have to ‘try something different’, I have no idea, as ‘sticking with the familiar’ is my favourite strategy when on holiday in Norfolk; rise late, walk on beach, lunch, shop at local shops for evening meal, visit the pub, cook dinner, teevee, bed, repeat.

But different it is, and the caravan is certainly that.  A lot of thought has gone into the modern caravan.  For a start, room in the bedrooms has been sacrificed to create more room in the communal areas, including a large kitchen and living area.  Obviously the designers consider that a family going on holiday together will actually want to spend time with each other, which is a charming ideal (it is good to know that there is still a place in the world for wild optimism), or be able to watch the telly in comfort, which is pragmatism.  The seating area is a large el shaped ‘bonkette’, traditionally used by teens for pouty slouches in very much the same boneless way that lemurs drape themselves over tree branches.  As well as a kitchen you can actually cook in, there is a dining table that you can sit at without having to fold away either another piece of furniture, or a teen.  All of this occupies the same space at the front of the caravan, the shared family living space.

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

The site itself is a mixture of residential and rentals.  You can tell the residential caravans because they are surrounded by tiny gardens enclosed with low fences.  Residential caravans also come with extensions, usually those lock up plastic tool sheds you see that look like a cross between one of those things that go on top of cars for extra luggage, and a portaloo.  Judging by the contents of the open ones, these can house bicycles (sensible) or washing machines (very sensible).

In terms of pecking order, residents look down on renters, renters look down on motor-homes and everyone looks down on campers.  Scum.

The caravan has two loos.

That’s right.

Two toilets.  Fuck the iPod, two toilets in a caravan is real design genius.  Two toilets in a caravan is probably the single greatest contribution to family, if not world, peace since the invention of alcohol.

I remember the facilities of my youth.  Even in the long hot summer, where the crispy crinkly grass’s colour had faded like that of an old Polaroid picture first to dull green then to brown, the toilet block had a fringe of lush green grass around it, kept fresh by the eternally damp concrete that was in turn moistened by the Timotei-scented showerings of endless adolescents and the occasional Imperial Leather lathered middle class refugee.

This then, is luxury caravanning.  Luxury because of the space, luxury because there’s a little rack to hang your towels up to dry on the outside of the caravan, luxury because the telly is colour and large (although not as interesting as watching the goings-on of your fellow caravanners through the enormous picture window) and luxury because, most importantly of all, you don’t have to lead a torchlight parade to shared facilities last thing at night, in flip flops.

Postcard from Yorkshire: Yurts and all

Just outside Masham, near the village of Ilton, is the Druids Temple. Not actually raised by those bloodthirsty beardy types at the dawn of time, this Neolithic style stone ring and assorted sticky-uppy cairns was in fact created in the Victorian age, yet another folly raised by beardy types, just not bloodthirsty ones in robes.

It's an interesting enough wee place to visit and one does not have to bee an anthropologist to work out that it has been used ritually, the ritual in question being Helen where the local teens sneak off somewhere to make a campfire, around which they drink cider, make out and pass out. At the rear of the temple is what might be termed the holy of holes but is more accurately described as the 'cave of piss and cider'. A couple of discarded lighter fluid cans suggested that the youth either really like getting their babies going with a bang, or supermarket cider isn't cutting it anymore. I dread to think what the effect of sniffing lighter fluid is but can only hope they don't attempt it while smoking a fag.


The other folly in the area is the brand new camp site 'Bivouac'. When we to led up this consisted of half a dozen yurts in a field, a camp site shop/office, a toilet block, a cafe and a business model best described as ambitious. Turns out, this is an environmentally friendly camping site. Which means no glamping. If I rent a yurt, I expect hot water, a microwave, a bed with a topper and wi if. What I do not expect is. Standard of comfort that, if the brochure is to be believed, would have Gengis Khan saying 'fuck that' and off on his pony to the nearest Travelodge.


The environmental aspect is good for business, and I sense a real business opportunity in running a combined drystone wall building adventure weekend and drystone wall repair business. I can imagine if I read the Guardian this is just the sort of place I would go camping and it has to be said the scenery is spectacular, as long as you can see over the drystone walls.. The problem is that to get there, I would have driven from London in my 4x4. Having a coffee in the cafe and resisting the urge to leaf through a copy of 'green parent' (I was aware of the folklore relating to green children, but was hitherto unaware that it was a genetic thing), I was worried when I asked for directions to the loo that I would be handed a trenching tool and dictions to a bank of soft earth. However, the loos were actually rather lovely and, fair enough, the wee shop sold a 'breakfast' lit for a tenner that essentially consisted of a lot of pork arranged in various meaty ways. Just the thing for a hungry yurt dweller.

G&P review of the year

It’s traditionally the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular. So why not?

The Gentleman and Player review of the year.

It started off cold, with snow and stuff. It then got very warm very quickly. In May the temperatures were such that one was knocking around in shorts and tee shirts while away from the playing field or exercise class. Was this unseasonably warm weather early in the year the ‘Arab Spring’ that everyone refers to? Or is that because it made everyone dress like Mediterraneans? Either way, it was warm.

Which was good, because Summer itself, although not cool, did not live up to the expectation. I had enough barbeque gas stock piled in my shed to fuel a space shuttle launch, had NASA decided to continue with the programme. They didn’t and mankind took a giant step backwards, the space shuttle joining Concorde in the cabinet of things we used to be able to afford to run but can’t any longer. We now have to rely on the Russians to get stuff into space. This is the same people that we rely on for our supply of gas and, if their success at launching rockets is any indication of the quality of their products, it’s probably a good job I never got round to using any of the stuff to cremate some chicken legs.

Later in the year we had riots in England. The media at the time and since tried hard to suggest that the trigger for this was anger. Anger at the police, anger at the ‘haves’ by the ‘have nots’ and anger at society generally. What it seemed to be most of all was anger at plate glass windows of J B Sports shops.

The year rounded off with protest camping. Interestingly, the growth in protest camping and the need for equipment was not enough to stop ‘Blacks’, the high street camping retailer (and so presumably best placed of all to sell you stuff that would allow you to camp on the High Street) going into receivership. This demonstrates that either the campers were actually so angry with society that they looted their equipment, or they bought on-line, just like everyone else.

Oh shit, just realised that Blacks is where I buy my barbeque gas. Good job I stock-piled.

Pramping in St Paul's

It's Occupied London are, I suppose, protesting about the dire dearth of decent public loos in the capital, and quite right too. It's bad enough that public loos are few and far between, with those super-loo monstrosities dotted around the place like, literally, a shit TARDIS, but one can't even be assured of a decent loo if one employs the popular tactic of dodging into a pub, pretending to be a customer and using the facilities. Even perfectly decent boozers seem seem unable to maintain a perfectly decent gent's. In the case of the place I was in last week, going to the gent's was like wandering into a coastal cave at low tide, it was gloomy, the floor was wet and there was a prominent odour.

Of course, there is also I believe a faction within the protesters who represent Occupy London. Like their hipster brethren across the Atlantic in New York, they are protesting that the banks have all the money and won't give it to people like them to, presumably, buy bigger tents. They are angry, but not as angry as the people who think that the architectural and spiritual magnificence of St Paul's cathedral is really not improved by being surrounded by quite a lot of nylon in jolly primary colours.

The prampers outside St Paul's cathedral are doing a fantastic job of drawing attention to how crap the Church of England are at taking a hard line on using a holy water cannon to wash the protesting scum off the streets, while at the same time neatly deflecting attention away from the bankers down the street who are fucking up the economy through their trademarked working methods of greed, stupidity and spending the afternoon wandering round in a coked-up daze after doing a couple of lines off of a sweaty hookers arse in the company car park during lunch.

The media has made much of the prampers. Apparently they go home in the evening, leaving their tents behind. I trust that the local homeless population are aware that a load of comfy middle class tents, presumably with iPod docks and cool boxes full of sustaining snacks and indifferent wines, are available for occupation at St Paul's. Let's see if the protestors are quite so happy to occupy a tent that has been used overnight by Dosser Dave and his incontinent dog Digger. And I hope that when the protestors do eventually pack up and leave, they check the tents first. Nothing would put a crimp in your first day at the Glastonbury festival quite like shaking out your two-man 'Mountain Master 4000' and discovering a desiccated tramp. And his dog.

Whatever you think of people who camp in the centre of the city, they are bloody irritating. The council, police and church all appear powerless to get rid of the tents. In my experience, the best way to remove campers is to start charging them exorbitant rents for their pitches. All St Paul's needs to do is become a National Trust property and it's problem solved.

The other way to remove tents is of course for the weather to turn bad, although I expect that foul weather in England in November is too much to ask for (and the ongoing mild weather could be taken as a sign that the protest has some sort of higher approval). Maybe they need an act of God. A few days of rain and I don't care how committed the protestors are, they'll soon beat the twat singing Coldplay to death with his own lute and buggered off to the nearest decent pub.

VW camper of delight

Like every normal adult male, the Lego catalogue drops through my door on a regular basis. A slim but gratifyingly glossy publication, it tends to shy away from listing the 99p minifigs and other pocket money sets widely available in the toy shops of the shires and focus more on limited edition monstrosities designed to appeal to dads who think their child could benefit from a Death Star large enough to pose a real crushing hazard to their toddler. These toys are only available in the community of Online, near I believe the settlement of Internet and connected with what I understand is termed a superhighway. Essentially the peak of mankind's technical achievements mean that you can get plastic brick kits that cost two hundred and fifty quid delivered to your door.

Sitting comfortably I flicked through the pages. It was the usual stuff designed to appeal to the adult Lego enthusiast, that is, anyone who is of an age lucky enough to count 'slave Liea' rather than Jar Jar Binks as a formative experience, and then...what's this? A VW camper van, in Lego. For only eighty quid!

http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/Volkswagen-T1-Camper-Van-10220

There is something slightly queasy about the ultimate symbol of anti-establishment freedom (most VW campers come ready spray painted with the CND symbol on the side, a Greenpeace sticker instead of a tax disc and a handy storage compartment to hide your weed) costing eighty quit in Lego form. Surely anyone with eighty quid is better of buying, as Malcolm Tucker put it 'a goat the whole village can fuck', rather than a Lego kit that, once assembled, is at best going to sit there gathering dust (and writing as the owner of a Lego X Wing, I write with authority...and yes, of course I love it, it's a Lego X Wing, when the house is empty I recreate the Death Star trench run in my hallway) and at worst is going to be a constant nagging reminder that you don't own a real one.

Men dream of owning a real VW camper van. It's the ultimate symbol of freedom and of picking up hippy girls and having uninhibited sex with them. Maybe though, the joy of the open road is best experienced as a journey of imagination. On the open road of the mind there are no speed cameras and no BMWs, there are loads of places to pull over and enjoy the view, there are still Little Chefs and there are still happy hippy hitch hikers.

Still want one though.

Protest camping...Pramping?

Camping. It’s very popular, apparently. Of course, it’s always been popular with outdoorsy types, and poor people. But as the recession has bitten deeper, it’s also become popular with families who have worked out that the airport tax that it costs to get their three kids onto a flight to somewhere sunny will keep the parents in enough decent chardonnay to numb the pain of having to spend two weeks in a field with a dozen other families all coming to terms with the fact that in order to be able to help their kids with university fees, they are going to be spending less time sunning themselves and more time wondering why the shower block doesn’t have complimentary Molton Brown toiletries, and trying to out-do one another with barbeque marinades (my tip…lard, simple, elegant, and nothing says ‘campsite feast’ quite like the smell of frying lard).

By 2010, a holiday under canvas could be categorized thus:

Camping. Heavy canvas tents, featured in ‘Carry On’ movies, tents with a sense of history, the sorts of tents that the Empire pitched in jungles and artic wastes, the sort of tents a scout master was disgraced in, with guy ropes that are set like booby traps to trip the unwary. In recent years, advances in camping technology mean that entire tents are now made out of the same material that cagools used to be made out of, making them light, waterproof and ensuring that the inside of the tent usually has the same smell that the inside of a cagool.

Wild camping, used to be called trespassing, different to camping because while it still takes place in a farmer’s field, there's no stand pipe in the corner, just a cattle trough. (Nearby salt lick likely to deter middle class families on low sodium diets).

Glamping, a recreation favoured by middle class parents who can no longer afford to take their children abroad or the even more expensive alternative: centre parcs. Glamping offers the promise of a stay in a decent B&B or a boutique hotel. This is, of course, complete bollocks as, even if you stay at a Travelodge, your stay is unlikely to feature you treading in cow-shit as you make your way to a stinking toilet block in the dead of night. A tent is a tent, deal with it, be honest with yourself and embrace camping – it’s easy, just strike up a conversation with your camp-site neighbour about your journey to the site, sustaining a conversation about the perils of this countrys’ A roads for three hours before drinking enough wine to allow you to sleep despite your wife’s muffled sobbing and your eldest child’s stubborn refusal to exit the car. At all.

Festival camping - does not really count. Camping is all about pitching your tent, fetching your water, cooking your dinner and brushing your teeth in a communal toilet block next to a bloke who you are pretty sure sneaks looks at your wife’s breasts when he thinks nobody’s looking. It’s also about waking at dawn in the countryside far from the cares and distractions of the pantomime that passes for real life and having a cup of tea in complete silence before the business of the day – a punch up with your lusting neighbour and trying to tempt your kid out of the car – begins. It is not spending ten seconds sproinging your pop-up tent into existence, hoisting one of those fluttery pennants above it so that you can find your way back, realizing that every other bugger has a pennant just like yours and so fixing your position using GPS on your smart phone, then going and getting wasted for three days, doing all your sleeping in hedges or the St John’s Ambulance recovery tent/chill out lounge.

Previously, those were your choices. Let me add another:

Pramping - protest camping.

The tented village on Parliament Square has been forced from the grass on to the pavement. This, I suppose, tests the convictions of the protesters as it's one thing to camp on grass, but a different proposition entirely to pitch your tent on paving slabs six inches away from a bloody big bus belching diesel fumes. Also, it's harder to dig a latrine pit through concrete. I have always been perversely proud of the peace camp outside parliament, when it was a single bloke but bloody hell, a whole village?

One can’t help but have the sneaking suspicion that while Brian Haw was a committed protestor who embodied much that was great about England – taking a stand, commitment to a cause he considered just, defiance of authority – and while his presence there was a living embodiment of the other great English values – tolerance and fair play (can you imagine a protestor trying that in North Korea, or Italy? At least when they turned the water cannon on it would put out the flames from the burning encampment), I can’t help but wonder if any of the other campers are not so much there to protest but rather saving on a hotel room and spending their money on tickets for Madam Tussauds and the Phantom of the Opera.

I walked past the other day and there were so many tents I was wondering if there was some sort of festival on.

Pramping is, I think, here to stay. And I’d like to see more of it. We have many gorgeous civic buildings in this country, seats of power crafted by Victorian architects. But what those tall towers, high windows and splendid cornices need to set them off is a little village of tents in primary colours outside each one. Pissed off with your council cutting libraries? Pramp! Annoyed that your parish council have chosen to ignore your plea for a bus shelter with a roof for the third year running? Pramp! And why draw the line at democratic institutions? Who the fuck organises ‘Britain in bloom’ and why has your village never won? Pramp! Camelot…every week you buy a ticket but have you ever won? Ever had a sniff? No? Pramp!

And as for the ticket prices at Glastonbury…actually, no, your protest would, I’m pretty sure, go unnoticed.

The wild side

A subject described by a colleague of mine, as I ranted, as ‘sooooooo Sunday supplement’. But I’ll post it on a Friday anyway.

Putting ‘wild’ in front of something does not automatically raise it into the realms of peril and adventure. This is particularly true of swimming and camping.

Swimming is great, but can be somewhat hectic at half-term, where lots of excited children in the water basically results in you swimming in child soup. As alternative to breaststroking through a cocktail of chlorine and pee, how about using a natural pool? Possibly a limpid one in a glade. That, or the river or a lake or the sea.

When did swimming out doors, which er, most people do when on holiday, become ‘wild swimming’? Surely ‘wild swimming’ is when one pitches over the side of the boat into the rapids or when somebody on the beach screams for your attention and utters the sentence no bather ever wants to hear ‘don’t look behind you…just swim!’

It’s like ‘wild camping’ – it’s a tent, in a field – it’s not wild camping…it’s camping! Just camping and only camping. What the hell do you expect camping to entail…pitching a tent indoors? That’s not a camping site, it’s the shop floor at Millets!

Wild camping should include at least the following elements: an extinction level weather event, an animal attack repelled with a shovel, scenery containing at least one precipice and last but not least, a sing-song.

The answer to climate change...take a flight to somewhere warm?

I’m confused about climate change. I thought that we were all supposed to be concerned about global warming. Global warming was, apparently, going to result in the UK being like the Mediterranean. On the one hand, I like the idea of doing f**k all work in the afternoons and tapas, on the other hand it might mean that our cars get smaller and women get hairier.

Looking out of the window on this August evening, I don’t see many olive groves sprouting. Indeed it’s pretty hard to see anything, what with the wind lashing the rain against the window like that.

Now, this is not global warming, but climate change. Climate change results in severe weather events like rain in summer. Frankly, anyone who’s had experience of the British summer might consider that rain in August is situation normal and the only emissions we should be worried about are people talking out of their arse about climate change.

So hand-knitted home-made hats off to the climate change protesters at Heathrow who have set up camp to try and raise awareness about the dangers of air travel. Well done them for tying up police time and public money with quite the most pointless bloody protest since I staged a sit-in for extra ribena at play-school.

‘Deluded’ is the word that springs to mind. Looking at these tossers on the news I was a little shocked to see that what I had assumed to be a cagouled troll was in fact a person, who was spouting off about air travel being bad and who was ‘demanding to be heard’.

Okay. 1. Stand as an MP. 2. Get elected. 3. Vote against air travel. 4. Get enough of your mates to do the same and end the problem. Or…spend the weekend in a damp camp pooing lentil curry into a latrine you’ve had to dig yourself, getting pissed on home-brewed scrumpy and wearing a sweater you’ve never washed with detergent in order to save the environment.

The truth is that the best we can do is manage air travel and that nobody is interested in direct action tossers. The last big protests, marches through London and so on to do with airports were when airport expansion was being mooted. Lots of middle-class people saw the threat of large reductions in the value of their properties and the possibility of tyre-marks on their roof if the pilot came in for a low-landing and they rebelled. Result - no new runway.

You want to see people truly exercised about air-travel? Ask anyone who lives on a flightpath or who has ever had a cube of blue-ice the size of a fridge land like a meteorite in their greenhouse (tip – get rid of it before it melts!).

And if you want to be taken seriously, get a shave a suit and a job.

A professional protestor in uniform – you know love, you’d be quite pretty if you washed your hair, used some make-up, dropped a stone and wore a nice dress. How on earth does she think she’s going to attract a bloke like that?

Precipitation and Cocktails

Strolling around Parliament Square yesterday I see that the tented village on the green has expanded, no doubt some revellers from Glasto stopping off for some shopping at Harvey Nicks before buggering off home. If these types want to treat the place like a camp site, then surely the council should too.

If a farmer expects to charge campers a tenner a night to camp in a soggy field where facilities begin and end with a stand pipe and which still shows signs of its being a location of the pyre formally known as his herd until the foot n’ mouth epidemic, then I think that a hundred quid a night is a reasonable price to charge campers in London.

Either that or re-designate their tents as ‘facilities for use by the public’. Believe me, those campers in the Blair Witch Project would be considered having got off lightly compared to some pissed-up reveller crashing into a camper’s tent in the wee small hours after several cocktails too many and thinking the place was a superloo.

It started to rain as Fat Andy and I wandered round the Square on our way to cocktails, I was minded to dodge under canvas and wait it out but Andy did the impossible and flagged down a cab for hire. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the Royal Festival Hall’s new bar ‘Skylon’, watching ballet dancers doing their warm-ups, disconcerted that the waitresses were wearing retro sci-fi uniforms and deciding which exotic beer to try first.

There were cocktails that night, mixed with verve and style in the unlikely setting of a pub. It looked like the sort of place where they consider a lager top to be a cocktail but this place had a shaker, tequila and an impassioned bar staff.

After that things got a bit hazy, but suffice to say it was a last train home situation and a breakfast this morning of paracetamol and temperance thoughts.